I make a point of not responding to negative reviews unless they strike me as unfair and/or inaccurate. Everybody’s got a right to an opinion on a novel and I have no argument with that. Reading a novel is a collaborative affair — me plus the reader. Sometimes it’s not a good fit.

But I do take exception to the assumptions made about who wrote what, and so on. That I, for example, supposedly contributed subplots “which seemed forced.” You don’t know what I added or didn’t add. I don’t think it’s asking too much for the novel to be taken on its own terms and not subjected to this guesswork, educated or not.

This brings me to Craig’s comment, which also falls into the unfair category. Judge my book because you like it or not, but don’t dismiss it — without reading it — because Robert B. Parker did a lousy job on POODLE SPRINGS.

Most of the response to my collaborations with Mickey has been very positive. I never figure to please everybody, but it was my honor to have Mickey himself, in the last week of his life, ask me to take on these collaborations. There were six substantial Mike Hammer manuscripts, all in the 25,000 to 30,000 word length, often with plot breakdowns and character notes. That hardly compares to the small manuscript Parker worked with on POODLE SPRINGS, and I guess we all know Chandler didn’t ask Bob to complete it for him. Mickey’s very famous character, Mike Hammer, appeared in a scant thirteen novels published during Mickey’s lifetime. That I had the opportunity, with Mickey’s blessing, to add six more to the canon all with substantial Spillane content was/is a responsibility and thrill. I felt much the same about THE CONSUMMATA, because it represented the only other Morgan novel. This May, the second Mike Hammer novel, LADY, GO DIE! — begun in 1945 shortly after I, THE JURY was completed — will be published by Titan, the first of the final three substantial Hammers.

These are collaborations. I extend and shape the material — usually 100 to 125 double-spaced pages — to meet a length of around 300 such pages. I don’t just pick up where Mickey left off. It’s a blending of the two writers, and Spillane material appears deep into the book, well past the half-way mark. And again, sometimes he’s at least roughly outlined the rest.

Part of my method is to never add sub-plots that weren’t set up by Mickey, nor do I introduce new characters not found in Mickey’s substantial manuscript. THE CONSUMMATA does contain one of the most extreme examples of this process — there was no explanation for who or what the Consummata was. I used the s & m fetish of the chief bad guy to come up with my vision of who (not what) the Consummata might be, beyond just an evocative title for a novel. The final s & m sequence drew up on similar scenes in THE BODY LOVERS and several Spillane novellas. It seemed to be where he was heading. But there is not one character, or plot thread, in the novel that Mickey didn’t create or put in motion.

I believe this to be a unique situation in mystery fiction — that this much material existed for the first writer’s chosen collaborator to deal with. Though you imagine (with no basis other than speculation, however confidently and glibly you might express it) that Spillane set aside THE CONSUMMATA because he was displeased with it. There were many factors contributing to the unusual number of substantial unfinished manuscripts in Mickey’s files, perhaps the most significant being his relationship with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He was forced out of the church several times because his published work was considered too racy and violent. Many of these manuscripts end at such a moment — in THE BIG BANG, the final thing in the manuscript was a very graphic sex scene (which more than one reviewer like you assumed I had written). THE DELTA FACTOR was written just before his most graphically sexual Mike Hammer, SURVIVAL…ZERO! and his sexually explicit THE ERECTION SET. Mickey was out of the church at the time, which would have been the case when he began THE CONSUMMATA.

The notion that Morgan the Raider is a different character (presumably because I don’t know how to write him) is not unusual in Spillane or any writer, particularly when a little time between series entries has passed. Mike Hammer varies greatly between books, whenever a year or more has passed between their writing.

Again, I take no issue with your overall negative appraisal. You didn’t like it. Some do like it. That’s horse racing. But I object to these assumptions and assertions about who wrote what, and why I did what I did, which you have no way of knowing.